‘Old joke.’
‘New version.’
‘You’re fixated on Jews,’ Arkady said.
‘I’m fixated on Russians.’ The chill of the basement sent Arkady into another coughing fit, and Levin relented. ‘Come with me.’
They went up to Levin’s office, where, to Arkady’s amazement, the pathologist broke out a bottle of real cognac and two glasses. ‘Even for a chief investigator, you look awful.’
‘I need a pill.’
‘Renko the Hero Worker. Here.’
The sugary cognac was soaked up by the mass alongside Arkady’s heart. Nothing seemed to reach his stomach.
‘How much weight have you lost recently?’ Levin asked. ‘How much sleep have you had?’
‘You have pills.’
‘For fever, chills, runny nose? For your work?’
‘A pain-killer.’
‘Kill it yourself. You don’t know fear when you have it? Not the Hero Worker.’ Levin leaned forward. ‘Drop the case.’
‘I’m trying to shift it.’
‘Not shift it. Drop it.’
‘Shut up.’
Coughing again, Arkady set his glass down and bent over, holding his ribs. He felt Levin’s icy hand slip into his shirt and run over the tender swelling in the middle of his chest. Levin hissed. By the time Arkady’s fit was done Levin had moved to the chair behind his desk and was writing on a slip of paper.
‘This will inform the prosecutor’s office that you have a coagulated mass resulting from contusions and hemorrhage of the chest cavity and need medical observation in case of pyrenemia and peritonitis, not to mention the possibility of a broken rib. Iamskoy will give you two weeks at a sanitorium.’
Arkady took the slip and crumpled it.
‘This’ – Levin wrote another slip – ‘will get you an antibiotic. This’ – he opened a drawer and threw Arkady a bottle of small pills – ‘should help the coughing. Take one.’
It was codeine. Arkady swallowed two pills and tucked the bottle into his coat.
‘How did you get that lovely bump?’ Levin asked.
‘Someone hit me.’
‘With a truncheon?’
‘Just his fist, I think.’
‘That is someone for you to stay away from. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to a suicide that’s quick and clean.’
After Levin left, Arkady stayed while the codeine spread like a salve through his veins. With one foot he maneuvered the wastebasket closer in case he threw up, then sat very still and thought about the corpse downstairs. Both wrists and the throat? and gas? Was that animal rage or philosophical thoroughness? On the floor or in a tub? Private tub or communal? Just when he was certain he was going to be sick the nausea subsided and his head lolled back.
A Russian kills himself; that made sense. But, honestly, what would a Russian corpse have to do with a tourist? Three corpses – that had a more wholesale, capitalist ring to it, but even so . . . When does a tourist even find time to gun down people? For what Russian treasure worth stealing? From another viewpoint, what threats could three poor workers make against a man who could simply get on a plane and fly away to America, Switzerland, the moon? So why was he pursuing such a theory, let alone conceiving it? To hand the case to the KGB? To thumb his nose at the KGB? Or, getting personal, to prove to someone that being a mere investigator actually amounted to something, perhaps even a hero, as Levin suggested? Maybe that someone would leave Schmidt and come home? Yes to all questions.
There remained one more intriguing possibility: that the investigator himself had discovered – by accident, the way a man passes a mirror and suddenly notices he is unshaven, his overcoat worn at the collar – how shabby his work was. Or worse, how pointless. Was he a chief investigator or a processor of the dead, an adjunct of the morgue, his paperwork the bureaucratic substitute for last rites? A small point that, and merely indicative of socialist reality (after all, only Lenin Lives!). More important, careerwise, everyone was right. Unless he became a Party apparatchik, he’d gone as far as he ever would. Here and no further. Was it possible – did he have the imagination – to create some elaborate case full of mysterious foreigners, black marketeers and informers, a whole population of fictitious vapors rising off three corpses? All of it a game of the investigator against himself? There was a certain plausibility to that.
He fled the morgue for the rain, walking with his head pulled into his shoulders. At Dzerzhinsky Square crowds were running for the metro station. There was a stand-up cafeteria next to the children’s store across the square from the Lubyanka. He had to put something in his stomach, and he was waiting for the traffic to pass when he heard his name called.
‘Over here!’
A figure came from under a low archway to pull Arkady out of the rain. It was Iamskoy, a blue trench coat over his prosecutor’s uniform, a gilded hat on his shaved head.
‘Comrade Justice, do you know our extremely talented Chief Investigator Renko?’ Iamskoy brought Arkady over to an old man.
‘Son of the general?’ The justice had little eyes set close to a sharp nose.
‘The same.’
‘Very pleased to meet you.’ The justice gave Arkady a small, knobby hand. In spite of the justice’s reputation, Arkady was impressed. There were only twelve justices on the Supreme Court.
‘My pleasure. I was on my way to the office.’ Arkady took a step back toward the street, but Iamskoy held on to his arm.
‘And you’ve been working, since before the sun came up. He thinks I don’t know his hours,’ Iamskoy told the justice. ‘The most creative worker and the hardest worker. Don’t the two always go together? Enough! The poet lays down his pen, the killer lays down his ax, and even you, Investigator, must rest from time to time. Come with us.’
‘I have a lot of work to do,’ Arkady protested.
‘You want to shame us? I won’t have it.’ Iamskoy swept the justice along as well. The archway led to a covered passageway Arkady had never noticed before. Two militiamen wearing the insignia of the Internal Security Division stood aside. ‘Besides, you don’t mind if I show you off a little, do you?’
The passageway led to a courtyard of gleaming Chaika limousines. More expansive with each stride, Iamskoy led the way through an iron door into a hall lit by crystal fixtures in the shape of white stars, down a carpeted stairway and into a wood-paneled room of narrow mahogany stalls. The star-shaped fixtures on this level were red, and running the length of the room was a photograph of the Kremlin at night, a red flag twisting above the green cupola of the old Senate.
Iamskoy stripped. His body was rosy, heavily muscled and, except for his crotch, nearly hairless. A mat of white hair covered the justice’s concave chest. Arkady followed their lead. Iamskoy looked casually at the black swelling on Arkady’s chest.
‘A little rough stuff, eh?’
He took a towel from his stall and tied it like a scarf around Arkady’s neck to hide the bruise. ‘There, now you look like a regular metropolitan. This is a private sort of club, so just follow me. Ready, Comrade justice?’
The justice wore a towel around his waist; Iamskoy draped his over his shoulder and pulled Arkady close, his arm around Arkady’s back, whispering with a jovial confidentiality that excluded the older man.
‘There are bathhouses and bathhouses. Sometimes an official needs to freshen up, correct? You can’t expect him to wait in line with the general public, not with a gut like the justice’s.’
They passed through a tiled corridor ventilated by hot-air blowers and into a cellar vast enough to accommodate a long bathing pool of heated sulfurous water. Around the pool, within glazed Byzantine arches, swinging screens of carved wood hid alcoves furnished with short-legged Mongol tables and settees. Bathers sat in the steamy water at the far end of the pool.
‘Built during the distortions of the Cult of Personality,’ Iamskoy said in Arkady’s ear. ‘The interrogators at the Lubyanka were working around the clock,
and it was decided they should have somewhere to rest between prisoners. Water was pumped up from the underground streams of the Neglinaya, steam-heated and mixed with salts. Just as the facility was completed, however, He died and the facility was abandoned. Lately the complete silliness of not using it became apparent. It has been’ – he squeezed Arkady’s arm – ‘rehabilitated.’
He guided Arkady into an alcove where two naked men sat perspiring at a table bearing silver bowls of caviar and salmon in crushed ice, plates of thinly sliced white bread, soft butter and lemons, mineral water and bottles of plain and flavored vodka.
‘Comrades First Secretary of the Prosecutor General and Academician, I want you to know Arkady Vasilevich Renko, investigator in charge of Homicide.’
‘Son of the general.’ The justice sat, ignored.
Arkady shook hands over the table. The first secretary was big and hairy as an ape and the academician suffered from a resemblance to Khrushchev, but the atmosphere was relaxed and amiable, the same as in a film Arkady had once seen of the Czar Nicholas skinny-dipping with his General Staff. Iamskoy poured out spiced Pertsovka vodka – ‘pepper for the rain’ – and heaped caviar on Arkady’s bread. Not pressed caviar but roe as big as ball bearings, the kind Arkady hadn’t seen in a store in years. He ate it in two bites.
‘Investigator Nikitin, you remember, had a near-perfect record. Arkady Vasilevich has a perfect one. So I warn you,’ Iamskoy said in a soft mockery of his usual voice, ‘if you plan to do away with your wives, find another town.’
Tufts of steam drifted off the pool and under the screen to taint the mouth with sulfur. Not unpleasantly, though – more like an edge to the vodka. A soul didn’t have to travel for a cure, Arkady thought, just bathe below Dzerzhinsky Square where heroes were overweight.
‘White Dynamite from Siberia.’ The first secretary refilled Arkady’s glass. ‘Straight alcohol.’
The academician, Arkady gathered, was a member of this inner circle not for ordinary labors such as medical research but as an ideologist.
‘History shows us the necessity of facing west,’ the academician said. ‘Marx proves the necessity of internationalism. That’s why we have to keep an eye on those bastards the Germans. The minute we take our eye off them they’ll get together again, take my word for it.’
‘That’s who’s running drugs into Russia,’ the first secretary agreed strongly, ‘the Germans and the Czechs.’
‘Better ten murderers go free than one drug dealer,’ the justice spoke up. Caviar speckled his chest.
Iamskoy winked at Arkady. After all, the prosecutor’s office knew that it was Georgians who ran cannabis into Moscow and chemistry students at the university who concocted LSD. Arkady half listened as he ate dill-scented salmon, and all but closed his eyes in sleep as he relaxed on the settee. Iamskoy too seemed content to listen, arms folded; he’d yet to eat or more than sip his vodka; the talk lapped around him like water around a rock.
‘Don’t you agree, Investigator?’
‘Excuse me?’ Arkady had lost track of the conversation.
‘About Vronskyism?’ the first secretary asked.
‘That was before Arkady Vasilevich joined our office,’ Iamskoy commented.
Vronsky, Arkady remembered the name, an investigator for the Moscow Regional Office who’d not only defended Solzhenitsyn’s books but denounced as well the surveillance of political activists. Naturally, Vronsky was no longer an investigator, and the mention of his name caused a queasiness in the judicial community. ‘Vronskyism’ was a different kind of word, though, vaguer and more chilling, a breeze from a new direction.
‘What must be attacked, uprooted and destroyed,’ the academician explained, ‘is, generally, the tendency to place legalisms above the interests of society, and, individually, the tendency among investigators to place their interpretation of the law above the understood goals of justice.’
‘Individualism is just another name for Vronskyism,’ the first secretary said.
‘And self-centered intellectualism,’ the academician said, ‘the kind that feeds itself on careerism and flatters itself with superficial success until even the basic, tacit interests of the greater structure are undermined.’
‘Because,’ the first secretary said, ‘the solution to any particular crime – indeed, the laws themselves – are only the paper bunting on the concrete system of political order.’
‘When we have a generation of lawyers and investigators who confuse fancy with reality,’ the academician said, ‘and when paper laws are smothering the work of the organs of justice, then it is time to pull down that bunting.’
‘And if a few Vronskyites fall as well, all the better,’ the first secretary said to Arkady. ‘Wouldn’t you agree?’
The first secretary leaned forward, knuckles on the table, and the academician turned his clown’s round belly toward Arkady, who watched Iamskoy’s sidelong gaze. The prosecutor must have known even as he called to Arkady on the street where the conversation in the bathhouse would lead. Iamskoy’s eyes said, Concentrate . . . take care.
‘Vronsky,’ Arkady answered, ‘wasn’t he also a writer?’
‘True,’ the first secretary said, ‘a good point.’
‘A Yid, too,’ the academician said.
‘Then’ – Arkady draped salmon on a piece of bread – ‘you could say we should keep our eyes on all investigators who are also Jews and writers.’
The first secretary’s eyes grew. He looked at the academician and Iamskoy, then back at Arkady. A grin built on his mouth, followed by the pistol report of a laugh. ‘Yes! For a start!’
Defused, the talk fell to food, sports and sex, and after a few minutes Iamskoy drew Arkady away for a stroll around the pool. More officials had arrived, floating like walruses in the heated water or moving as shades of white and pink behind the lattice of screens.
‘You’re feeling especially subtle today, confident enough to dodge the thrust. Good. I’m pleased to see that.’ Iamskoy patted Arkady’s back. ‘At any rate, the campaign against Vronskyism begins in a month. You are forewarned.’
Arkady thought Iamskoy was steering him out of the bathhouse until the prosecutor led him into an alcove, where a young man was buttering slices of bread.
‘Look, you two must know each other. Yevgeny Mendel, your father and Renko’s father were famous friends. Yevgeny is with the Ministry of Trade,’ Iamskoy told Arkady.
Yevgeny tried to bow from a sitting position. He had a soft middle and a wispy mustache. He was younger, and Arkady vaguely remembered a pudgy boy who always seemed to be crying.
‘An expert on international trade’ – Iamskoy made Yevgeny blush – ‘one of the new breed.’
‘My father—’ Yevgeny started to say when Iamskoy abruptly excused himself, leaving them alone.
‘Yes?’ Arkady encouraged Yevgeny out of politeness.
‘A moment?’ Yevgeny pleaded. He concentrated on buttering the bread and adding dollops of caviar so that each slice resembled a sunflower with yellow petals and a black center. Arkady sat down and helped himself to a glass of champagne.
‘American companies in particular,’ Yevgeny glanced up from his artwork.
‘Oh? That must be a new field.’ Arkady wondered when Iamskoy would reappear.
‘No, not at all, no. There are a number of longstanding friends – Armand Hammer, for example, was an associate of Lenin’s. Chemico built ammonia plants for us in the thirties. Ford made trucks for us in the thirties, and we thought we were going to work with them again but they made a mess of it. Chase Manhattan has been a correspondent of Vneshtorgbank since 1923.’
Most of the names were unknown to Arkady, but Yevgeny’s voice was growing more familiar, though he couldn’t recall having seen him in years.
‘Good champagne.’ He put his glass down.
‘Soviet Sparkling. We’re going to export it.’ Yevgeny looked up with a face full of childish pride.
Arkady felt the gate ope
ning. Into the alcove stepped a man, middle-aged, tall, lean, and so dark that at first Arkady believed he might be an Arab. Straight white hair and black eyes, a long nose and an almost feminine mouth made an extraordinary combination, equine and handsome. On the hand carrying his towel he wore a gold signet ring. Arkady saw now that his skin was leathery, tanned rather than dark, tanned everywhere.
‘Absolutely gorgeous.’ The man stood over the table, and water dripped off him onto the arranged bread. ‘Like perfectly wrapped presents. I won’t dare eat one.’
He regarded Arkady without curiosity. Even his eyebrows seemed groomed. His Russian was excellent, as Arkady had known, but the tapes had missed the quality of animal assurance.
‘Someone from your office?’ the man asked Yevgeny.
‘This is Arkady Renko. He’s . . . well, I don’t know what.’
‘I’m an investigator,’ Arkady said.
Yevgeny poured champagne and pushed the dish of canapés around the table, prattling as he did so. His guest sat down and smiled; Arkady had never seen such brilliant teeth before.
‘What is it you investigate?’
‘Homicides.’
Osborne’s hair was more silver than white, and wet, it clung to his ears even after he toweled it. Arkady couldn’t see whether either ear was marked. Osborne picked up a heavy gold watch and slipped it on his wrist.
‘Yevgeny,’ he said, ‘I was expecting a call. Could you be an ange sur la terre and wait at the switchboard for me?’
From a chamois purse he took a cigarette and holder, joined them and lit the cigarette with a lighter of lapis lazuli and gold. The screen flapped behind the exiting Yevgeny.
‘You speak French?’
‘No,’ Arkady lied.
‘English?’
‘No,’ Arkady lied again.
Arkady had seen people like this only in Western magazines, and he’d always thought their gloss was a quality of the paper, not of themselves. The sheer physical smoothness was alien, intimidating.
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